Lowry: Recalling the 'mother of Karachi'

Sometimes you must get out, get dirty, go further down your road or around your certain corner to find inspiration.

Sometimes you have to go to the other side of the world.

I didn't go around the world this week — not physically anyway.

But in this time of year that brings on reflection and spiritual nourishment for so many people of more than one faith, I did find inspiration.

I found it in the life ... and death ... of Parveen Rehman, a gentle woman who sounds for all the world like the very best of us, a beholder of the old virtues of this life, a woman who threw her energies into working to save others.

I found out about Rehman only after she was gone, because I found a small item in The New York Times about her death and her burial. Student protesters remembered her this week as "the mother of Karachi."

She is but one more shot dead in a country grown too violent, in a city, Karachi, whose poor are numerous and sometimes invisible in plain sight.

I have seen such grinding poverty only twice in my life. Once, when I was in college, doing mission work of sorts in one of the poorest parts of West Virginia. I saw it again roughly two decades later, in one of the infamous favelas of Brazil. At the time I was on a Pew Gatekeepers Fellowship for journalists, and I filed a story to my home newspaper in Alabama from Rio de Janeiro that started like this:

The proud, old-world face of the street vendor strains under a wan smile as he cooks corn-on-the-cob over a makeshift iron stove. From time to time, he flames the coals with a flap from a cardboard box, looks up and nods politely to strangers.

He hardly seems to notice the noise of the neighborhood around him, or the forced strut of young toughs who walk by, or the foul smell emitted by the raw sewage that flows freely a few hundred yards away. …

Rehman, who had studied to be an architect, gave up that upwardly mobile life in order to do good work in place similar to that favela, to direct The Orangi Pilot Project, which sought to make life just a bit more bearable for those countless poor who scramble to get by in one of Karachi's worst slums.

From all indications, she was a source of hope for these people before she was so viciously gunned down by a gang of thugs on motorcycles on March 14. Some say the Pakistani Taliban was involved; some say she was assassinated because of her stand against land grabs by the wealthy.

Naturally we are deeply moved by the loss. Rehman was fairly young, still in her fifties, and from the clip I heard on NPR, a moving tribute by Steve Inskeep, a woman still very much full of life.

In one of the more poignant parts of the tribute, NPR replayed a segment of a 2008 story in which Rehman was one of those featured. Of her work in the slums she said this:

"Once you rise up horizontally, you take everybody with you. But if you want to rise vertically, then you will, but then nobody will be there for you."

I'm not sure what to make of it all, but this time of year, when people pause, if even for a few moments, to reflect and remember, or even to ask the age-old questions, "What's it all about?" or "What are we here for?" it seems to me it is worth thinking about the lives lived by people like Rehman, people who strive against the longest of odds and in so doing serve as shining examples for the rest of us.